Embodiments descried herein generally relate to a method to configure a control device for a production system, in particular for a printing system, and such a production system.
DE 297 20 991 U1 and DE 36 14 744 C2 describe systems having multiple computers that may communicate with one another.
Furthermore, network analysis apparatuses are known that may be connected in a defined network and that analyze communications executed over data lines of a network. The functionality of a data network is checked with such network analyzers, wherein only a small section of the data network is tested.
Ipswitch Inc., USA has designed monitoring software, under the product name WhatsUp Gold, to monitor computing centers and networks with 25 to 20,000 systems. All resources may hereby also be detected automatically and a map of their connections may be created. Active and passive monitoring technologies are used to monitor the individual computers. Furthermore, automatic alarms may be output upon errors.
Production systems are increasingly being individually designed. Earlier it was typical that, for specific types of high-capacity printers, a specific configuration had been manufactured and sold in multiple hundreds, and in some cases even a few thousands. It is becoming more common that a specific configuration of a high-capacity printing system is manufactured and sold a few tens of times, or even is individually assembled from predetermined components.
Production systems normally have a main computer on which control software is executed, with which control software the individual components of the production system are controlled. For each configuration of the production system, the control software is adapted and tested so that a certain operation of the production system is ensured.
The main computer and control computer of the individual components of such a production system may be specially developed microcontrollers. However, standard computers are increasingly used since these provide a greater computing power for significantly lower costs. However, given standard computers the problem exists that the generation cycle is normally not longer than one to two years. The overlap time between individual generations is often very short (for example <3 months). In addition to this, specific standard computer generations are only suitable for specific operating systems, such that the generation cycle of the hardware also requires a correspondingly short generation cycle of the software. In particular, it is typical to provide the hardware with new software versions of the operating system within even shorter intervals (for example 2 months), such that computers of the same hardware generation may have different operating system software. These computers are provided for pure computation operation in computing centers and in offices, but not for controlling production systems that are in operation continuously for multiple years and also need to be reliably serviced over the service life. Interruptions of the operation of a production system often incur high downtime costs.
A manufacturer of a production system may circumvent these problems in that he purchases and stores a large quantity of a computer of a specific type. However, this is not practical for the entire generation of a production system that is offered for multiple years, since it cannot be predicted what quantities of the production system are reached in the following years. A manufacturer of a production system is therefore forced to use a new computer generation at least after a couple of years.
An additional problem of such a generation change of the computer in a production system lies in that the computers communicate with the machine components of the production system via corresponding interfaces in order to control said machine components and/or read out operating parameters from these. Given a generation change of the computers, the corresponding interfaces also sometimes change, such that the control of the machine components of the production system no longer functions. The problems with the interfaces are very diverse, since only specific functionalities of the interfaces change, functions or interfaces cease to exist entirely, or the structure of the apparatus changes completely and is no longer compatible with the predecessor model. The adaptation of the machine components to a new computer generation incurs a significant effort, and therefore high costs.
Manufacturers of production systems often stock up on a large number of corresponding computers if the manufacturer of the computer announces that the corresponding model will be discontinued soon. This is tied to significant costs and requires storage space at the manufacturer of the production apparatuses.
Manufacturers of production systems therefore must decide whether they want to accept the advantage of the favorable computing power of standard computers with the disadvantage of the short generation cycles, or use special microcontrollers which have a lower computing power but are available over a longer time period. A production system that could be quickly and simply adapted to a new computer generation of standard computers would be very advantageous.